Norm Watenpaugh has spent the last 20 years giving South Valley
birds a fighting chance
GILROY
– You’re probably more familiar with Norman Watenpaugh’s
handiwork than you are with Norm himself.
Norm Watenpaugh has spent the last 20 years giving South Valley birds a fighting chance
GILROY – You’re probably more familiar with Norman Watenpaugh’s handiwork than you are with Norm himself.
If you’ve ever walked your dog along Uvas Creek or ambled along the trails surrounding Christmas Hill Park in Gilroy, or even stopped to look up at the trees in Gilroy’s Las Animas Park, you’ve likely seen numbered, wooden birdhouses perched atop poles or dangling from oak trees. Watenpaugh is the engineer, builder, installer and monitor of more than 100 of these birdhouses around Gilroy.
On Monday last week, at 8 a.m., Watenpaugh rolled his small pickup truck into a parking space at Christmas Hill Park to check in on roughly a dozen of his plywood avian townhomes in the hills and swales adjacent to the Uvas Creek flood plain. Armed with a reengineered paint-roller extension and a custom-made catch-box attached to the top, Watenpaugh hoisted the assembly up to a birdhouse hanging some 20 feet high from a limb of an old, large oak tree. He positioned the birdhouse into the catch-box and lifted the large hook up and away from the limb.
He checked inside and found nothing, but on the outside he sees where woodpeckers have been tap-tapping away around the perimeter of the hole, a hole drilled specifically for what he calls secondary cavity-nesting birds – mostly chickadees, bluebirds and titmice earlier in spring, and now a population of tree sparrows. Think of them as homebuyers looking for preexisting houses, and think of the woodpeckers as the builders of the original homes.
“They’re nature’s contractors,” Watenpaugh says of woodpeckers, clasping his hands together at his abdomen and flashing a big, toothy smile. He wears trifocals, but still has the habit of dropping his chin and looking up over the top of his glasses when he speaks.
The “contractors” build different-size holes in trees depending on their size and needs – around here they are mostly downy and acorn woodpeckers, and some flickers. After they are through with the nest, they abandon it to the secondary cavity dwellers.
“It’s like it was all planned by somebody,” again, flashing a smile. Typically birds will nest in order of specie, but this year Watenpaugh said the lingering rains mixed up that order. He stopped and pointed to one abandoned house that was taken over by bumblebees.
“I’d do the same thing the birds do – when bumble bees take over, I leave it alone,” he said.
The 75-year-old retired mechanical engineer pulled out a palm-sized spiral-bound notebook (the kind you can get at a grocery story for a $1) and began flipping pages and scribbling notes. He places the pen next to three other various-colored pens in the breast pocket of his fishing vest and sets out at a fair clip west along an abandoned road. As he walked he explained how he came to build wild birdhouses.
As an engineer and head of maintenance for Gentry Foods in Gilroy, Watenpaugh would often speak with local farmers about the onion-harvesting equipment Gentry sold.
“One day this farmer was telling me about an article he read about how effective barn owls were in keeping rodent populations down, and I just started thinking, ‘Could I make a house for a barn owl?'” he said while rubbing his chin with his thumb and several fingers – a common mannerism of Watenpaugh’s.
Off he went to research the owls – their size, nesting habits and other information that would allow him to build a house any momma barn owl would be proud of. In two weeks he had a nesting owl. That was more than 20 years ago. He now hikes the hills and parks around Gilroy caring for more than 100 houses for the birds.
“I’m amazed at his energy – day after day – to maintain them, take meticulous notes and to do it all with a smile,” said Nancy Teater, a member of the conservation committee of the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society, to which Watenpaugh also belongs.
He’s quick to remind everyone that the Santa Clara Valley branch actually existed before the national Audubon Society, “so all the others are really branches of us,” he quipped.
A half-mile up, the road took a sharp turn and headed up a meandering uphill switchback. Watenpaugh didn’t break stride, marching up at his always-quick pace. At the top, he immediately pulled out his weathered notepad and began to talk about what’s likely to be seen – and without a hint of being winded.
“This house was made for bluebirds,” he said, opening up the birdhouse to find a tree swallow nest. “The swallows don’t know that, though.”
In a birdhouse along a tree line next to a fallow field, he reached into a nest and delicately felt around inside. A moment later he pulled his cupped hand out with a swallow chick that he estimated was between a few hours and a day old. Its two siblings were still in their eggs.
The mother swallow circled Watenpaugh in a wide arch, occasionally darting down to take a closer look at the unannounced guests in her home.
The nest was lined with various shapes, sizes and colors of feathers. Watenpaugh explains that swallows are so fast, that they can pluck feathers from larger birds in flight to use as the material atop the straw base of the nest. He turned southerly toward a tree-lined draw, again at a good pace, using a hiking pole on his left side. He normally doesn’t use a hiking pole, but his heel is injured, and almost apologetically he said he’s walking a “bit slow today.”
While walking to the lip of the draw, Watenpaugh was guarded about why he spends so many hours a week (he walks two of these trails every day) caring for the birdhouses.
“I don’t know,” he said, letting the words hang in the air for a moment. “I could never just walk for nothin’.”
Many are thankful he does his volunteer work.
“Volunteers like Norm are hard to come by. He’s a gem,” said Kim Yuan-Farrell, the programs coordinator for the SC Valley Audubon Society. “His initiative is very valuable – he really makes things happen.”
In addition to covering miles of trails every week, Watenpaugh volunteers for the Wildlife Education Day at the Audubon offices in Cupertino, and leads bird walks at Earth Day Festival in Gilroy each year.
Back on the trail, now on the east side of the draw, he stopped suddenly and pointed to hard, cracked earth at his feet.
“Right here … right here,” he said with a rare exuberance, and went on to tell about the mountain lion tracks he discovered this spring while the ground was wet. As the crow flies, he was standing only a few hundred yards from the playground in Christmas Hill Park and on the edge of the planned Glen Loma housing project. The narrow end of the draw pointed west, right at the Eagle Ridge housing tract along the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
A few minutes later back at the Christmas Hill parking lot, Watenpaugh leaned on his pole to take some weight off his foot. He talked about the critical balance and the interdependence nature created for birds, mammals and humans.
“Yep,” he said. “It’s like it was all planned by somebody.”
How to help
California Bluebird Recovery Program
Who: Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society, 408-252-3740.
What: Monitors check birdhouses for use by western bluebirds and other local song birds, take notes and send data to the AS. Monitors can “adopt” a trail.
When: Depending on the number of birdhouses, a monitor will spend one day or a couple of days a week on the trail from late February to mid-August.
Where: Mostly in the area surrounding Christmas Hill Park and Uvas Creek, as well as a few parks in Gilroy.
Why: Development has depleted trees, and nonnative species compete for cavity nests. As a result, the western bluebird’s numbers have been dwindling. Manmade birdhouses, designed to keep out larger predatory birds, are needed to aid in the survival of bluebirds.
